If the state is to protect life at any cost, doesn't this imply a financial obligation to preserve the life of any child, no matter how deformed or hopeless, no matter what it takes? That means a considerable outlay of tax money, and in parallel cases, when the state assumes ...
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Lighting a Candle
Many Americans say they are fed up with their government, that “the time is right for a palace revolution.” President Obama’s approval rating has sunk below 40 percent, and the voters are angry not so much with the administration as with all incumbents. But why would anyone pay attention to opinion polls? All polls are...
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Islamists
Two small additions. First, the powers-that-be insisted upon Islamist as a negative term to distinguish real Muslims who want to kill us for the sake of religion from people who pretend to be Muslims without really having firm convictions. Perhaps we should call them Methodist Muslims or, for AW's sake, ...
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The Supremes and the NRA
I agree entirely with Aaron Wolf both on the constitutional argument but also on the deeper political question of the centralization of power. The problem is that we are all tempted to use the court when it suits our purpose, and in this case if I lived in Chicago I'd ...
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Cursing the Darkness
Her mother said she had been brainwashed. Her daughter had never liked who she was and was always looking to become someone else. Mother is quick to reassure reporters she is not prejudiced: “I’m not against Muslims. I married one.” Jihad Jamie, as the press has dubbed her, is only 31, but she has lived...
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Save the Children
Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...
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Dark Age to Dark Age
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire began to haunt the West’s imagination many centuries before Gibbon’s masterpiece immortalized the phrase. Indeed, it is hard not to agree with Friedrich Heer’s judgment that every European empire since Charlemagne’s time—the Holy Roman Empire, Czarist Russia, Napoleonic France, Hitler’s and Stalin’s failed experiments—was a conscious attempt...
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Cheating “Honest” Men
Sometimes I like to remind myself of what a nobody I am. It does not take much to trigger these fits of humility. A glance in the mirror or at the ever-expanding bulge in my vest is usually enough to call to mind at least two deadly sins that have tempted me all too often. ...
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Divide and Conquer
I have seen a great deal of your government since I came to India. Your forts, your arsenals, your ships, all are admirable. I have been down to Calcutta, and have been astonished with your wealth, your palaces, your marts, and your mint; but to me the most wonderful thing of all is that so...
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Abuse Your Illusions
Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions. Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a ...
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Greek Diary III
We had a big but quite mediocre lunch near the Agora, at Attalos, and by the time we got to the entrance, we found out they had changed the schedule for visiting the Agora. Returning the next day, we took our time getting lost on the site, which is impossible ...
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Greek Diary II
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...
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Print the Legend
It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral. After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...
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Redesigned
Readers will notice a few changes in the format of the February number. This is the first major overhaul since I became editor in 1985, and even a reader as visually impaired as the editor will note the larger and clearer type, the more balanced layout, and—if I may rhapsodize—the sense of spaciousness. None of...
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Greek Diary I
Greece is an ancient land but a young country, younger even than the United States, whose citizens have grown old, generation after generation, bragging about the youthfulness of their democracy. Here in Greece, as Toynbee pointed out in one of his last books, the multiple burdens of the ...
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When the Going Gets Tough . . .
Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore ...
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When the Going Gets Tough. . .
Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them . ....
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Fish or Cut Bait
President Obama’s nationally televised speech announcing an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan was everything we have come to expect from one of his speeches: vapid, dishonest, puerile, and–most of all–confused. Speaking grandly of an exit strategy he never defined, he did not once address the more serious question of an entrance strategy. What possible...
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Going Through the Motions
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
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Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity
Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...
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Athens and Jerusalem IV: Medieval Christian Wimps
Like, for example, Charles Martel and his son Charlemagne, Otto the Great and Barbarossa, Henry II of England and his son Richard Coeur de Leon, or, going to the East, Belisarius and Heraclius, Leo the Great and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, or the Christian Medieval rulers of Serbia—Stephan Dusan and Prince ...
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Islamophobia—or When Will They Ever Learn?
There is little to say about the shootings at Ft. Hood that has not already been said a thousand times in half-sentence bursts—expletives undeleted—on every newspaper site in the United States, but there are one or two questions to ask or ask again. Here in Ft. Worth, when I read ...
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Athens and Jerusalem III: Why Rome Fell
Why did Rome fall? To be more precise, why did the Western Empire collapse in the course of the fifth century? Gibbon and some later historians blamed Christianity, which, they allege, not only weakened the manly spirit that had sustained the Empire but also diverted manpower and resources away from ...
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Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
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Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
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Athens and Jerusalem II: A Religion for Sissies?
If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, ...
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The “Sin” of Humility
Humility is the great moral skandalon (stumbing block) of Christianity, in much the same way that Christ—the God who became man, suffered, and died a humiliating death—was the skandalon to the Jews. Thus it is a little amusing to read the complaints of so many uneducated neopagans—most of them anti-Semites—against ...
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Remembering Who We Were
We were in Athens, near the end of July, having dinner with some Greek friends at Attikos, a popular rooftop restaurant with a view of the Parthenon. Like most conservatives, our friends are somewhat pessimistic about what the future holds for their country, and from their description it seems to me that as the left...
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Substandard: The End of an Illusion
The sale of The Weekly Standard should put paid to any lingering illusion that the neoconservative empire was anything but a Potemkin village. Allegedly, Rupert Murdoch sold the magazine for one million dollars to Philip Anschutz, the billionaire owner of Clarity Media Group, but the price seems either much too high or much too low. ...
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Stepping Backward
When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure. His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...
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Wallow in the Mire
One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches. This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...
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The Wiki Club
Our friends at Takimag have posted an excellent column by John Derbyshire on the sins of Wikipedia. Derbyshire tried to correct his own entry, posted by someone obviously out to get him. He sums up the entire fraud in the sentence:
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Clean Jim, Dirty Harry, and Barry the Beer-Drinker
The conservative press lost no time in converting the Henry Louis Gates affair into a morality play that pitted a loose-lipped race-baiting President against a squeaky clean policeman with an excellent record in what is politely termed
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Johnny Rocco’s World
Conservative political strategists are like the military strategists they would like to emulate: They are always fighting the last war. For how many years, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, did conservatives continue to rail against the communist menace? Marxism, and not only the virulent Leninist strain adopted by the Bolsheviks, had once posed a...
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Credo for Conservatives Part III: Order, Tradition, and Loyalty
III. A social order, being a natural expression of human sociability, should not be undermined, overturned, or rejected on frivolous grounds. A. Man is not a purely natural creature and he never lived in a state of nature. Thus, since there is no such things as universal human rights ...
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The Good Life
“Say, I guess America is just about the best country that has ever existed in the history of mankind.” I have been hearing this assertion all my life and never fully understood what is intended, unless it is merely one of those ahems that we Americans inject into a conversation when we have nothing to...
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To the Future, and Beyond!
“The Amazing Kreskin” used to keep late-night television audiences in stitches with his fearless predictions of the absurd future. He always began with the windy declaration, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” With all due respect for a...
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Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemies
It is like a science-fiction movie from the 1950’s. Mysterious radiation from outer space takes over the brains of Asian men in America, turning them into moral zombies that go on killing sprees: a Buddhist in Texas who tried to beat the demons out of his three-year-old son who had eaten meat; a discharged IBM...
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Nations of Immigrants
The irrepressible Silvio Berlusconi is in hot water again with all left-thinking people, this time for his remarks on illegal immigrants. After praising Libya for taking back 500 illegals from Italy, the Italian PM observed,
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Free Men of a Republic
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi. I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...
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Dead Romans and Live Americans
“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop. English speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made. It is just the sort of...
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Self-Evident Lies
Jon Stewart: “You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society. Why would you not want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage?” Mike Huckabee: “Marriage still means one man one woman life relationship. I think people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically ....
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Il Whig in Italia
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
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Rendering Unto Lincoln
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death. In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct. We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before ...
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Rendering Unto Lincoln
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death. In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct. We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before Lincoln’s disciples degraded the currency—and...
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A Mirror for Magistrates
Here is the way the Constitution works now. Roland Burris, a longtime public servant in Illinois, will not be allowed to take his seat in the U.S. Senate because he has been appointed by a corrupt governor in a corrupt state. No matter that the Senate has never in its history denied a seat to...
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Uncle Sam’s Harem
These days bipolarism appears to be the “in” childhood malady touted by leftist psychologists, who previously promoted ADHD to explain away the disturbed behavior exhibited by postmodern children and adolescents. The list of problems is long: antisocial behavior, poor performance in school, sexual promiscuity; depression and suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism; violence and random acts...
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Oresteia V: The Eumenides–the Conclusion
Before going on the Eumenides , let us reflect a little on the theme. The Greeks regarded homicide with awe. Like Montenegrins and Albanians until recently, the brother or father of a murder victim felt a physical burden. The would-be avenger could not eat or sleep until revenge had been ...